CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Appalachian Power will soon begin installing 50,000 new meters at homes in the Charleston area.
Utility spokesman Phil Moye said the work is part of an ongoing project to replace the old meters which includes technology from about 15 years ago with new devices, called AMI meters have read information from a customer’s power box digitally.
“With the radio frequency meters we had people driving in the neighborhood to collect the information by being in close proximity to the meter from the vehicles,” Moye told MetroNews Monday. “This will actually send a signal back into our company and let us read the meters remotely.”
The days of the “meter reader” are long gone and were actually replaced about 15 years ago with the current technology, Moye said. The new age meter reader simply sat in a truck and drove through the neighborhood. Now, even that won’t be necessary.
“It is a more efficient way of doing things, but it also helps us to help our customers out. It helps us get service turned on more quickly and has the potential to let us know more quickly when there’s a problem on the system like an outage,” said Moye.
The installation will include about 50,000 households in the Kanawha Valley. It comes after the company already changed almost 500,000 of the meters over the past two yeas in its service territory in neighboring Virginia and Tennessee.